697 Quotes by John Irving

My dear boy, ” Miss Frost said sharply. “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make a category before you get to know me!

You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

The day women stop reading – that’s the day the novel dies!

I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual.

When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?

At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net,” The Wonder herself had told him. “There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story – better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you’re capable of making it.